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Pilgrim Trails 

A Ply mouth -to -Provincetown 
Sketchbook 




FRANCES LESTER WARNER 







;THQ 



Class 
Book 
Copyright N?..-. 

COKP'.GliT DEPOSIT! 




PILGRIM TRAILS 




* 



North Street, Plymouth 



PILGRIM TRAILS 

A PLYMOUTH-TO-PROVINCETOWN 
SKETCHBOOK 

BY 

FRANCES LESTER WARNER 



With Drawings 
By E. SCOTT WHITE 




The ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS 
BOSTON 






Copyright, 1921, by 
The Atlantic Monthly Press 



JUL -5 7.1 



■CI.AC14915 



CONTENTS 

Plymouth Towne 1 

Alden and Standish 18 

Winslow's "Great Lot" 30 

The Cape 33 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



North Street, Plymouth 
Plymouth Harbor .... 
Site of First House, Leyden Street 
"Nautical House" .... 
Old Plymouth Doorway 

Burial Hill 

John Alden's House, Duxbury (1653) 
The Myles Standish Monument 
The Standish House, Duxbury (1666) 
The Winslow House, Marshfield (1699) 

"The Ark" 

Old Fish Wharf, Cape Cod 

The Pilgrim Monument, Provincetown 



Frontispiece 
4 



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6^ 

22 

24'"' 

26- 

32 

36 

42 

46 



\^ 



PILGRIM TRAILS 

i 

PLYMOUTH TOWNE 

"There!" said the artist, "isn't that a nau- 
tical-looking house ?" 

When the artist says that a house is nautical, 
he means that it looks as if it had been built by 
seafaring men; not by wealthy ship-owners, but by 
generations of skippers and men before the mast. 
When you build a nautical house, you should begin 
more than a hundred years ago with a small cot- 
tage on the side-hill over the harbor, and add on a 
snug cabin now and then, tucking in a shipshape 
companionway here and there, and running a new 
section out along the slope. If you like to indulge 
your taste in roofs, you make a different kind for 
every addition. One section may be gable, another 
lean-to, and the one-story addition may run out 
as long as you please, shaped on top something like 
the roof of a barge. Simply fit your building to the 
ups and downs of the land and the ways of the wind. 
A bit of faded blue paint somewhere on the blinds 
or near the door, and all your roofing weathered by 
many hundred harbor gales, and your house is 
nautical. 



2 PILGRIM TRAILS 

There are not as many of these in Plymouth as 
in Gloucester, but there are a few. In fact, at 
Plymouth you may find almost any kind of build- 
ing you look for, from Mansard roofs and bunga- 
lows, to the lobster-houses down by Eel River, the 
shooting-boxes out on the sand-spit, and the dark 
old structures beside Town Brook and around the 
region once known as Clamshell Alley. 

We had left the car at the garage, and had walked 
along the upper streets over the hill. The artist 
was going sketching, his brother Alexander was 
meeting a business appointment, and Barbara and 
I had come to see Plymouth. 

"I'm going in among those places on the other 
side of Town Brook," said the artist. "The only 
way to find something good is to go everywhere 
you 're not supposed to." 

"But you and Barbara," said Alexander, as he 
prepared to escort us out to the main street, "might 
as well go where you 're supposed to." 

He paused for a moment to let his words sink in. 

"The best way," said Alexander, " is to follow 
your guide-book." 

"The best way," said the artist over his shoulder, 
"is to explore." 

Barbara receives advice from her two brothers 
with the air of a young empress listening to the 
remarks of two prime ministers, but makes her own 
decisions. I have acted as her confederate and 
chaperon on so many occasions that I know enough 
to be quiet until the prime ministers have gone. 



PLYMOUTH TOWNE 3 

"The best way," said Barbara when this had 
happened, "is to ask a little boy." 

Doubtless any real expedition to Plymouth ought 
to begin with the Rock. We found our way down 
along the water-front, to the place where the 
Rock used to be, but it was nowhere in sight. 

"When I was here before," said I, "the Rock 
was exactly here, under its canopy at the foot of 
Cole's Hill. You could n't miss it." 

Barbara looked out along the wharves. Some 
children were playing at the end of one of the piers. 

"We'll ask a little boy," said Barbara, leading 
the way. 

"They look like little foreigners," said I. "Do 
you think they would know ?" 

For answer, Barbara went out slowly to the 
edge of the pier, and stood watching the white sea- 
gulls flying over the harbor. The boys gave her a 
glance, made up their minds about her, and went 
on with their play. 

" Where 's the Rock ? " said Barbara casually, over 
her shoulder. 

"They're moving it," said one. 

"It's all broke up," said another. 

"Want us to show it to you ?" said a third. 

"Yes," said Barbara. "Where are they moving 
it to?" 

"Down to the edge. When they get it there, we 
can swim right up to it," said our guide with unc- 
tion. "But now it 's all broke up." 



4 PILGRIM TRAILS 

He was leading us rapidly back to Water Street, 
to a great pile of masonry by the roadside. "That's 
the rock," said he. "Here 's some, and here 's some, 
and here's some more. All broke up." 

The boys were scrambling over the arches and 
hopping about among the blocks of granite. 

"Oh, yes," said Barbara tactfully, "this is the 
old canopy that used to be over the Rock, is n't 
it? And where 's the real Rock?" 

Our guide looked puzzled. Then light dawned. 
"The little one with 1620 on it? Down on the 
other side of the road." He waved a brown fist. 
"See?" 

And there it was, the famous boulder, waiting 
to be taken to its new position at the water's edge. 
Plymouth Rock is a very satisfactory relic; just 
the shape of a Rock. Its prehistoric excursions with 
the glacier and its historic pilgrimages since 1620 
have combined to lead it a roving life. In Revolu- 
tionary days it was on Town Square, with the Lib- 
erty Pole; then it migrated to the lawn in front of 
Pilgrim Hall; then it rested under its canopy at the 
foot of Cole's Hill — and in all these positions it 
inspired tourists to remarks about the agility of the 
Fathers in using it as a stepping-stone from the 
harbor to dry land. And now, in 1921, it goes back 
to the original landing-place, where the high tides 
will reach it again. 

Barbara and I congratulated ourselves on our 
luck in arriving at the right time to catch it on the 
move. Probably its fourth century of fame will 






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Plymouth Harbor 



PLYMOUTH TOWNE 5 

bring it more visitors than ever before, including 
our friends, the little delegates from Portugal and 
Italy, who hope to swim near by. 

"Now," said Barbara, "let's go up to Leyden 
Street and see if we can imagine that it 's First 
Street, with the first houses and all." 

Taking our imaginations well in hand, we found 
Leyden Street and the site of the first house. 
Probably it is not necessary to be thrilled at every 
inch of Plymouth. No matter how many times we 
visit it, I think we expect to find it looking more 
gray and spectral than it does; just as children, 
from much study of the map, half expect to see 
the land of China look yellow. There are fishing- 
coves on the Maine coast that look a good deal 
more like our childhood idea of Plymouth — 
weatherbeaten houses, low roofs, and great dark 
cliffs with the surf pounding against them. Mrs. 
Felicia Hemans is not entirely responsible for our 
misconception. We know that we shall not see 
the original block-house, but we still have a linger- 
ing feeling that Plymouth ought to look gray. 

And Leyden Street does not. It is old, but not 
decrepit. A very short street, with close-set houses, 
some v of them painted white or yellow; and at 
the head of the street, on what used to be Elder 
Brewster's Meerstead, the fine Post-Office build- 
ing — it is hard to realize that this is the place 
where the Mayflower settlers staked off their nine- 
teen plots of ground. Even in winter, there is no 
sweeping impression that anything very grim or 



6 PILGRIM TRAILS 

perilous ever happened here. But one impression 
we do feel strongly. If we stand at the head of the 
street by Elder Brewster's spring, and look down 
past the site of the first house, at the blue harbor, 
and then turn and look up at Burial Hill, we find 
ourselves thinking of the compactness of it all. 
Within a three-minute walk, we have caught a 
glimpse of the landing-place, Cole's Hill burying- 
ground, the site of the first house, the first street, 
and the hill where, as Governor Bradford says, 
" they built a fort, both strong & comly, made with 
a flate rofe & batllments, on which their ordnance 
were mounted, and wher they kepte constante 
watch, espetially in time of danger." The times of 
danger seem remote from Plymouth now, "espe- 
tially" at the corner of Leyden Street. 

In order to feel the true sense of history, — not 
a worked-up sentiment, but the real thing, — you 
have to look at Plymouth, not in, panorama but in 
detail. You have to accept with philosophy such 
modern phenomena as the Massasoit Shoe-Shine 
Parlors and the Plymouth Rock Garage, and keep 
your eyes open for certain types of old houses scat- 
tered in unexpected places everywhere. 

One of these is a neat old house in excellent re- 
pair, the ends of the house of brick, the side toward 
the street of wood, plain gable roof, stout chimney, 
the whole thing painted white, and all fascinating 
within. This is Tabitha Plaskett's house, on Court 
Street, near Pilgrim Hall. It is not so very old, — 
only two hundred years come 1922, — but it is the 







Site of First House, Leyden Street 



PLYMOUTH TOWNE 7 

one of its kind into which visitors are most natur- 
ally admitted, for they sell antiques there now. But 
before the Revolution it was the home of Mrs. 
Tabitha Plaskett, the first woman to keep a school 
in Plymouth. 

Barbara and I went in, seeking gifts, and we 
stayed to look at the doors. They are plain one- 
paneled doors, each made of a single piece of wood, 
with old hand-made hinges, — some the H-hinge, 
some the H and L, — with irregular hand-wrought 
nails, and on each door a polished door-latch of 
slenderest design. The tiles around the fireplace 
are blue and white, the central one showing a dog 
running very fast, with all four feet off the ground, 
and all his legs held perfectly stiff like the legs of a 
rocking-horse. 

We were shown the place where Tabitha Plas- 
kett used to do her spinning and her school-teach- 
ing at the same time. Every legend-lover recalls 
the story of Tabitha's famous way of punishing 
children, by slipping a skein of yarn underneath 
their arms and hanging them up on a peg on the 
wall, much as Mrs. Peter Rabbit in the story hangs 
all her little rabbits on the clothes-line. The soft 
yarn probably did not hurt the children, though 
the position must have been, for the moment, em- 
barrassing. We wonder whether Tabitha really 
did this often. If we remember our own schooldays, 
we know that the story of a punishment can take 
a fabulous turn in less than two hundred years. 
But from her epitaph on Burial Hill, we may be 



8 PILGRIM TRAILS 

fairly sure that her relations with the public were 
not without an occasional breeze. She is supposed 
to have composed the epitaph herself, and it cer- 
tainly sounds like the document of a vivid person- 
ality. We may read it now, carefully chiseled on 
her grave-stone, under an elaborate design of urn 
and weeping willow: — 

Adieu, vain world, I Ve seen enough of thee 

And I am careless what thou sayst of me 

Thy smiles I wish not 

Nor thy frowns I fear 

I am now at rest, my head lies quiet here. 

Well, Tabitha's headstone now overlooks the 
place where the little children go along to school. 
If you should go into the primary rooms after 
school-hours, you would see the sand-tables and 
the little desks, and, hanging around the walls, a 
series of paper cut-outs of the Three Bears and the 
Little Red Hen. And if you should ask to be al- 
lowed to look at the register, you would find there 
some names that would remind you of the cabins of 
the Mayflower and the Fortune and the Ann, to- 
gether with some that came over in a later ship. 
Surely the boys and girls of to-day will not object 
if we imagine Tabitha calling the roll of their last 
names in alphabetical order ? She stands beside 
her spinning-wheel and begins: "Alden, Cook, 
Crane, Dante, Davenport, Deschamps, Donovan, 
Kitchin, Kerrigan, Locatelli, Malaguto, Metz, 
Morgan — " And she goes on, adjusting her voice 
to the musical variety of the names, until she ends 



PLYMOUTH TOWNE 9 

the alphabet with "Thornhill, Vacchino, Wood, 
and Worcester." It is like a pleasant chant of the 
nations. 

It is a very pretty question whether Tabitha 
Plaskett could maintain the quiet orderliness that 
we see now in these primary rooms, and make head- 
way with her spinning at the same time. Would 
she apply the skeins of yarn internationally ? And 
would she know just what to do with the sand- 
tables ? If she could keep school again in her old 
house now, perhaps, instead of punishing the 
wicked, she would reward the just by letting them 
go into the front room, when they were very good, 
to look at the dog running like a rocking-horse on 
the blue tile. 

Another kind of house that stirs our "sense of 
the past" is the sort that really does seem old on 
the outside. A little way down Sandwich Street is 
the Howland House, built in 1666, recently re- 
paired and opened to visitors. If we are looking 
for a house that actually did come under the eye of 
the Pilgrims, this is one. A plain gable cottage, 
now painted the dull red that we associate with 
"little-red-schoolhouse" coloring, it stands a little 
back from the busy street, and the visitor goes in 
through a turnstile at the gate. Inside, all sorts 
of old furniture, including spinning-wheel and car- 
riage-top bed, make it look as much as possible as 
if it were still inhabited. Other houses that were 
built in the sixteen hundreds, especially the Holmes 
House, also repay the trouble of searching them 



io PILGRIM TRAILS 

out. And when we find them, they look as if they 
had been built in the spirit of Governor Bradford's 
specifications about the colony's purpose in found- 
ing the Plymouth Plantation: ''Not out of any 
newfanglednes or other such like giddie humor, by 
which men are oftentimes transported to their 
great hurt and danger, but for sundrie weightie 
& solid reasons." There is not much "giddie 
humor" about the old beams and rafters that have 
borne the solid weight of two hundred and fifty 
years. 

In Plymouth there are many houses made partly 
of brick, with iron S-shaped anchors bolted through 
their brick-work to the beam inside. There are 
some of these on the side of Leyden Street near 
LeBaron Alley. And on North Street, there are 
great Santa Claus chimneys, with small low houses 
built around them, the structure of the house look- 
ing altogether too tiny to go with the generous 
flues. 

Best of all, perhaps, because they have plenty 
of space around them, are the unpainted gambrel- 
roofed houses on the outskirts of the town. Now 
and then you find one where the shingles that cover 
the house from top to bottom have weathered a 
silver gray. Here and there the shingles have curled 
a trifle, so that they look like the bark of a shag- 
bark walnut tree, in no danger of flying away with 
the wind, but making the house look crusted, pic- 
turesque. And there are some gabled houses where 
the long slope of the roof has sagged a little, just 



PLYMOUTH TOWNE n 

enough to make a place for moss and shadows, but 
not enough to look fallen in. 

Barbara and I did not find all these the first day, 
or the next. We spent a good deal of time scouting 
over the moors, among the bayberry bushes and 
the pointed red cedars. Now and then we came 
upon a cranberry bog, hidden away behind what 
one geologist calls the " tumbled hills of Plymouth." 

It was Alexander who showed us the best Colo- 
nial mansion. The frame was got out in England, 
and brought over in 1754, and, tradition says, was 
put upside down. It belonged to the Winslows — 
not the Edward Winslow who wrote "Good News 
From New England" in 1624, but a later branch 
of the family. The Winslow family seems to have 
prospered steadily in the early days — one of the 
cases where, in the elder Winslow's own words, 
"religion and profit jump together, which is rare." 

"I want to show you the Winslow house," said 
Alexander; "the house where Emerson was mar- 
ried." 

"I think we passed it on the corner of North and 
Winslow," said I. "Isn't it the fine square one, 
painted yellow and white, with the carving of fruit 
around the doorways ?" 

"That's it," admitted Alexander placidly, "but 
you don 't know that house just by going past it on 
the street." 

He led us down North Street to Winslow, and 
found the point where we could get the best view. 

"Now," said he when he had planted us to his 



12 PILGRIM TRAILS 

satisfaction, "notice the doorway, with those two 
immense linden-trees shading the path. The orig- 
inal shoots of the Winslow linden-trees were 
brought to this country in a raisin-box. Up on the 
front of the house, over the upstairs window, you 
see the carving of the British Lion and Unicorn. 
This branch of the Winslows in Revolutionary 
days remained Tories and were very loyal to the 
King; and after the war their property went into 
other hands. But their Lion and Unicorn are as 
good as ever." 

"Is it really true," asked Barbara, "that the 
house is upside down ? " 

"Well," said Alexander, "the legend is very old. 
And the second-story rooms are a great deal higher- 
studded than the rooms downstairs. There's one 
door upstairs that looks as if it had been made for 
a giant. But they say that some of the English 
builders used to plan a house that way." 

Whether the house is upside down or not, one 
thing is certain — that here Miss Lydia Jackson 
was married to Emerson. Once in a while an event 
in the world takes place in precisely the perfect 
setting. Emerson's marriage was one. The huge 
English door, almost as broad as it is tall, with its 
great brass knocker and deep paneling, knows how 
to swing wide open in a stately way of its own; a 
proper door to welcome Mr. Emerson. And the 
rooms inside, with their high white paneling and 
delicate beading around the top, have dignity in 
every line. In every room there is a fireplace, with 



la* 




OA/ Plymouth Doorway 



PLYMOUTH TOWNE 13 

tiles. In the room where Emerson was married, 
the tiles around the fireplace illustrate Scripture 
stories — the drawings exactly in the style of the 
pictures in the New England Primer. Jonah 
emerges from his specially constructed fish; Elijah 
sits under his juniper bush; Jacob awakens from 
his dream. Under each picture is a reference to the 
Bible, with chapter and verse; so that, if you should 
fail to recognize any Bible worthy from his picture, 
you could look him up. 

In the hallway, the white staircase, with its 
mahogany rail, is deeply paneled at the sides, and if 
you stand beneath the stairway where it turns, 
you see still more careful paneling on the under side 
of each stair. The spindles of the balustrade are 
white and delicately carved, and the slender newel- 
post is twined with a perfectly proportioned white 
spiral, like a smooth round stem of a vine, running 
round and round it, and disappearing into the 
woodwork of the rail. 

This house, with its linden trees, its traditions, 
its Lion and Unicorn rampant over the sea, was 
the best example of old-time royalist elegance that 
we saw. 

"Are you going sketching this afternoon?" 
asked Barbara politely of the artist. 

"Yes, on Burial Hill," said he. "Want to 
come r 

"Don't you ever carry a camp-chair?" said I. 

For days I had been longing to ask him that ques- 



i 4 PILGRIM TRAILS 

tion, when I saw him starting out with no visible 
sketching equipment except a leather affair, which 
looked like a lawyer's brief-case, strapped over his 
shoulder. 

"Yes, I always take a chair," said he. "It folds. 
It's in the leather case." 

I, who remember the days when people went 
sketching with an immense French sketching- 
umbrella, a camp-chair, an easel, and a portfolio, 
looked with respect upon the leather case. 

"Before we go up to the hill," said the artist, 
"don't you want me to show you the most stun- 
ning subject for a painting that I've found ?" 

Even Alexander rose to this. We followed our 
leader down past the old Junk Shop, in among the 
old houses at the water-front, and as we picked 
our way around the corner, the artist threw up his 
hands in despair. 

"Oh, ye gods," we heard him say, "it's gone!" 

We followed his tragic gaze out toward the har- 
bor, expecting to find that an ancient landmark 
had been razed to the ground. 

" What was it ? " said Barbara anxiously. "Have 
they moved it somewhere else ?" 

"Yes," said the artist bitterly, "they've moved 
it somewhere else. It was the washing that was 
out on that line — the colors — all the accents — 
Portuguese as you can imagine — and they 've 
taken it in!" 

Alexander turned on his heel and left us to make 
our way back to Burial Hill. He sympathizes with 



PLYMOUTH TOWNE 15 

his brother's sorrows when fishermen go down to 
their boats and change all the rigging the moment 
a marine sketch is half done; but he is not quite 
advanced enough to grieve because Portuguese 
laundry no longer flaps against the American blue. 

"By the way," said the artist when we reached 
the Hill, "the lettering on these stones is some- 
thing remarkably fine. Pemberton identifies it 
with Caslon lettering, Caslon the Elder, English 
typefounder in the sixteen hundreds. I '11 show you 
the article when we get home." 

Barbara was examining a very old stone. "Lis- 
ten," said she, — 

"The spider's most attenuated thread 
Is cord, is cable to man's tender tie." 

As we made our way along the paths beside the 
family lots of the Bradfords, Cottons, Harlows, 
LeBarons, and Howlands, we began to notice how 
the wording varied with the relative age of the 
stones. For example, "Edward Gray, Gent." is 
older style than " Josiah Cotton, Esq. " And "That 
Virtuous Woman, Mrs. Rebecca Turner" is of an 
earlier period than "Mary, Relict of Deac. Lot 
Harlow." 

We found one very stately epitaph to a young 
wife, the simplest expression of the language of be- 
reavement: "By this event a husband was deprived 
of his best friend." 

Far more elaborate is the tribute to Mrs. Lucy 
Hammatt, Relict of the late Capt. Abraham Ham- 



1 6 PILGRIM TRAILS 

matt. Still clear and definite, the inscription, 
deeply lettered on the face of the worn slab, records 
the ideals of an exemplary life: — 

Composed in suffering, in joy sedate, 

Good without show, for just discernment great. 

But Barbara's favorite among the epitaphs was 
one on the stone of a young Southern bride: — 

Phebe J. Bramhall 

a Native of Virginia 

and Wife of Benj. Bramhall 

Possess'd of an Amiable Disposition 

It suggests that our early ancestors were not im- 
pervious to Southern charm. 

On our way down the Hill, we went around to 
see the harbor at sunset. Clark's Island in the dis- 
tance, Captain's Hill, Manomet — we had begun 
to think of these as our own landmarks. 

"Since this is our last night at Plymouth," said 
Alexander that evening, "don't you want to see 
the country by moonlight ?" 

"It's only a half-moon," said Barbara critically; 
but we went. 

On our way, we went up to look at the town from 
the site of the old Watch-Tower, on the very top of 
Burial Hill. We climbed the Hill this time by the 
path nearest the sea. The low branches of the 
twisted tree over the flight of steps made strange 
patterns above us against the sky. There is one 



&. 




Burial Hill 



PLYMOUTH TOWNE 17 

place on the summit where you can look out into 
the darkness of the country, not toward the lights 
of town. Here you can see only the shadows of the 
elm branches and the outlines of the slanting stones. 
And here, I think, we found the time for the spirit 
of place to be abroad. We did not see the kindly 
ghosts of Adoniram Judson and Bathsheba Brad- 
ford and Captain Jabez Harlow. But we were in 
the midst of something very real. All the odd 
phrasings of the epitaphs — the relicts and con- 
sorts and phyticians — were hidden now, trans- 
lated by the shadows. We saw only the silhouette 
of the past; and it was not grim or gloomy, but 
only brave. The record of antique sorrow is a quiet- 
ing thing. Every thought on this hill was thought 
a long time ago. The poignancy is out of it now. 
And as we stand on the spot where the Pilgrims 
once set watch every night for danger, we cannot 
help being stirred by the gray dignity of their 
thoughts about the continuity of life. 

We stayed only a moment. Then we went down 
again, pausing only to watch the harbor lights. 

Plymouth harbor is a quiet place by moonlight, 
and Burial Hill is a very quiet place. Yet it gave 
us the most direct message we had — of spacious 
thought dramatized in narrow setting, of definite 
achievement with inadequate equipment, of the 
resourceful valiance of those early people, and of 
what Governor Bradford calls " their great patience 
and allacritie of spirit" in the face of life, and death. 



II 

JOHN ALDEN AND MILES STANDISH 

THEIR LAND 

Duxbury, Duxberie, Duxborough, Ducksbor- 
row: the early writers spelled it as they pleased. 
But the Duxbury Light, Duxbury ships, and Dux- 
bury clam-flats have standardized the spelling for 
all time. This town, across the harbor from Ply- 
mouth, where grants of land were settled by Myles 
Standish, Elder Brewster, and John Alden, has 
been the home port of notable ships and men. 
Merchant-ships, brigs, and schooners, — the Eliza 
Warwick and the Mary Chilton, the Oriole, the 
Lion, Boreas, and Seadrift, the Triton, Matta- 
keeset, and the Hitty Tom, — these and hundreds 
of sail besides were built here in the shipyards and 
manned by Duxbury boys. Among the early men 
of Duxbury were Benjamin Church, who captured 
Philip the Sachem; Major Judah Alden and Colonel 
Ichabod, descendants of John Alden and Priscilla; 
Colonel Gamaliel Bradford and Captain Gamaliel, 
his son; George Partridge, one of George Washing- 
ton's Congressmen; and Ezra Weston, the King 
Caesar of the shipyards. 

At one end of the town used to be the Ezra 
Weston ropewalk; and not too far away was the 



ALDEN AND STANDISH 19 

famous Duxbury Ordinary, the tavern where, in 
1678, Mr. Seabury the landlord had license to "sell 
liquors unto such sober-minded naighbors, as hee 
shall think meet, so as he sell not less than the 
quantie of a gallon att a time to one p r son and not 
in smaller quantities to the occationing of drun- 
kenes." Mr. Seabury was evidently to use his own 
judgment as to which "naighbors" were suffi- 
ciently sober-minded to sustain the gallon. 

But doubtless the oldest Duxbury settlers were 
the clams. The colonists called them, first, "sand- 
gapers," then clamps, then clambs, clambes, 
slammes, and clammes. We surmise that the clam 
was not at first the Pilgrims' favorite dish, when we 
read Mr. John Pory's account of his visit to Ply- 
mouth in 1622. "Muskles and slammes they have 
all the yeare long, which being the meanest of God's 
blessings here, and such as these people fat their 
hogs with at low water, if ours upon any extremitie 
did enjoy in the South Colonie, they would never 
complain of famine or want, although they wanted 
bread. " When we read this remark of Mr. Pory's, 
we wonder how it happened that the Pilgrims .were 
reduced at one time to five grains of parched corn 
per meal per person. But suppose that you your- 
self had never tasted a clamb at a clam-bake, and 
had never been introduced to it in the right circum- 
stances by the right people — would it naturally 
occur to you to steam it, and discard its little neck, 
and make a chowder of its straps ? This would call 
for the strictly pioneering spirit, especially if, in the 



20 PILGRIM TRAILS 

words of an early explorer, these clamps were oft- 
times "as big as ye penny white loafe." In fact, 
the only Pilgrim who at all adequately celebrates 
the clam is Edward Winslow. "Indeed," says he, 
"had we not been in a place where divers sort of 
shell-fish are, that may be taken with the hand, we 
must have perished, unless God had raised up some 
unknown or extraordinary means for our preser- 
vation." And to-day, in certain spots along the 
Duxbury coast, from the Gurnet to the Nook, you 
may still find the descendants of those early sand- 
gapers drawing down their necks at your approach, 
lest peradventure you take them with the hand. 

Barbara and I explored Duxbury, not for clams, 
but for another sort of oldest inhabitant, the trail- 
ing arbutus. We did not explain to Alexander the 
object of our quiet trips to the woods, for it was the 
middle of winter, and we felt that he might not sym- 
pathize with our simple-minded quest. Of course, 
we did not expect to find flowers, but we thought 
that we might find a root or two of mayflower from 
John Alden's land, to transplant on our hill at 
home. We know that it does grow in Duxbury, 
but we must have looked in all the wrong places. 
Like many other great explorers, we found all sorts 
of things other than the thing we sought: charm- 
ing patches of checkerberry and mosses; blueberry 
bushes growing where blueberries ought not to 
grow and arbutus ought; many pleasant views of 
Captain Standish's tall monument on the Hill, but 
not one stiff rusty leaf of a mayflower. Finally we 



ALDEN AND STANDI SH 21 

decided to go to the present Mr. John Alden and 
inquire. 

We hail from a part of the country where you 
would no sooner ask a person to direct you to his 
patch of trailing arbutus than you would ask him 
the combination of his safe. We therefore planned 
to word our question discreetly. " Do you know," 
we planned to say to Mr. John Alden, "whether any 
mayflower, or trailing arbutus, ever used to grow 
in Duxbury ?" 

That ought to give him a chance to tell us about 
contemporary mayflowers, if he cared to, at the 
same time giving him plenty of leeway if he pre- 
ferred to dwell upon the past. 

We were putting the finishing touches on our 
speech as we went up the path to the old John 
Alden house, when a great touring-car, with an 
Indiana number, went rocking past us up the un- 
even lane, and stopped. 

"Can you tell us," said a gentleman, leaning out 
of the car and calling back to us, "whether this 
house is open to visitors ?" 

"We don't know," said I, "but we know that 
Mr. John Alden lives here." 

"I '11 ask him," said the gentleman from Indiana; 
and he went to the door. 

"He says it's open to-day," reported our new 
guide in a moment, helping his family out of the 
car, and giving the youngest child a big jump up 
into his arms. 

Barbara and I, abandoning trailing arbutus, 



22 PILGRIM TRAILS 

merged ourselves with the family group, and went 
in at the front door. 

The little hallway is papered with the kind of 
paper you sometimes see in houses where "George 
Washington spent the night" — gray, with land- 
scapes. But, in addition to the landscapes in this 
paper, there are slender pillars in groups, a design 
that makes you think of a miniature Alma Tadema 
picture, all in gray. This wall-paper is, of course, 
not as old as the house, but it is old-fashioned 
enough to be interesting. 

We threaded our way in single file around the 
door, into the hallway, and our host invited us first 
to go upstairs. 

The stairs go straight up beside the great chim- 
ney, very steep and narrow, each stair twice as tall 
as a modern stair and half as deep. At the top, we 
went around the slope of the chimney and into the 
rooms above. Here, in these low square rooms, 
with the supporting beams still showing the marks 
of the broad-axe, and the wide boards of the floor 
attesting the size of timber-growth in the early 
days, we found a perfect paradise of old-time fur- 
niture stored away. We were allowed to stop and 
prowl among the old possessions. None of the 
things used by Priscilla are here, of course; these 
are the accumulations of generations that fol- 
lowed her. 

In the corner by the chimney, we saw a small 
wooden cradle, with its wooden roof sloping in three 
sections over the top. On the wall hung an old Ian- 




^ 



Johti Aldetis House, Duxbury, l6jj 



ALDEN AND STANDISH 23 

tern made to hold a candle, the kind of "lanthorn" 
that might have been used by Moon in "A Mid- 
summer Night's Dream." 

We were looking at the churn and the yarn- 
winder, when one of the ladies called us to look at 
the strap-hinges on the door. These hinges, hand- 
made of iron, long and narrow and pennant-shaped, 
run out almost a third of the way across the door. 
The iron latch, also hand-wrought, is worn where 
the bar slips into the hasp, and the downward curve 
of the lift of the latch is bent into a thin twisted 
shape. One of the doors, a curious, three-paneled 
affair, is supposed to have been saved from a former 
house of John Alden's. 

The present house, built in 1653, was the place 
where John Alden spent his later years. Here he 
lived to the age of eighty-nine, holding important 
offices in Plymouth Colony up to the time of his 
death. He was one of the eight Purchasers who 
bought from the Merchant Adventurers their inter- 
est in the colony, after the expiration of seven years' 
copartnership. And in paying the required sum of 
eighteen hundred pounds, he, with Myles Standish 
and the other "Undertakers," must have been very 
busy managing the Plymouth trade, and " fraight- 
ing the White Angell, Frindship and others "with 
saxafrass, clapboards, and beaver. They were a 
busy brood, those old-comers; and John Alden, 
whom Bradford called "a hopfull young man," 
fulfilled the promise of his youth. 

Ever since his death, his house has been lived 



24 PILGRIM TRAILS 

in by Aldens. The present John Alden is a Grand 
Army veteran, son of a veteran of the Civil War, 
grandson of veterans of the Revolution, and grand- 
father of a veteran of the World War. 

He led us downstairs, and out to the large room 
where they used to do their fireplace cooking. The 
fireplace is closed now, but the spirit of the house 
is still one of comfort and hospitable good cheer. 
From its windows you cannot quite see the place 
where Myles Standish lived; it is too far away. 
But it is pleasant to know that the Captain and 
John Alden were near neighbors, and that one 
of Myles Standish's sons married one of the daugh- 
ters of Priscilla. All of Priscilla's eleven children 
turned out well; many of them were later called 
to "act in publick stations;" and the old house has 
been the homestead of her descendants all these 
years. 

When we had signed our names in the big 
register, and turned to go, Barbara said, "Do you 
know why the Aldens and Standishes left Plymouth 
and came over here so far ?" 

"Why, they came over to settle it," said Mr. 
John Alden kindly; "to open it up." 

As we went out down the lane, we turned to take 
one more look at John Alden's land. There, in the 
middle foreground, we saw the artist, sketching 
busily. 

"How did you get here ?" we asked in a breath. 

"In the car. How did you get here ?" 

"We walked," said Barbara with emphasis. 




The Myles Standish Monument 



ALDEN AND STANDISH 25 

"Like to go the rest of the way by stage?" 
inquired the artist affably, hoisting his sketching 
kit over his shoulder and pointing to the car at the 
foot of the lane. "I'm going over to the Standish 
house next." 

"Did you know," said Barbara dreamily to the 
artist, as she seated herself in the car, "that the 
four most famous descendants of John Alden and 
Priscilla were John Quincy Adams, Henry Wads- 
worth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, and 
Tom Thumb ?" 

"Barbara," said the artist gravely, "did you 
make that up ?" 

"No," said Barbara, clutching the seat as we 
went around the corner on one wheel," "I looked 
it up. 

Country over which you have just been prowling 
on foot looks very different when viewed from a 
car. The blackberry tangles and wild rose-bushes, 
through which we had waded on our way to the 
woods, were now simply part of the scenery. And 
the Myles Standish monument, which had been our 
mariner's needle, one of the necessities of life, was 
now only a forsaken .watch-tower, with a solitary 
figure on top of it against the sky. We went careen- 
ing up the side-road to the Standish house, which 
was built in 1666, not by the captain himself, but 
by one of his sons. 

It was closed. An old house, locked, with an open 
field around it and the sea below; a perfect place 
for sketching, and the rising wind from the sea. 



26 PILGRIM TRAILS 

Barbara went softly up to the doorway and touched 
the rusty latch. On one side of the doorstep was 
a lilac bush, and on the other a wild birch. 

This is probably the oldest of the gambrel-roofed 
houses on the harbor. There is something very 
strong and homely about the pitch of the roof — a 
balanced, firm old line, in splendid proportions with 
the huge chimney and low walls. A weathered gam- 
brel has a way of looking at home in the fields, a 
sort of boulder-shape firmly settled. And the Stan- 
dish house, with its flat field-rock for a doorstep, 
looks like a very old settler indeed. 

For a long time we sat on the doorstep and 
watched the outline of Plymouth Town across the 
harbor, and the white gulls flying, and the crows. 
The son of Standish of Standish knew where to 
pitch a house. 

Thoreau criticizes the Pilgrims for lacking the 
explorer's instinct. They were not woodsmen, he 
says, nor, except spiritually, pioneers at heart. He 
calls attention to the fact that it was long after the 
landing before they explored the woods and ponds 
back of Plymouth, territory "within the compass 
of an afternoon's ramble." "A party of emigrants 
to California or Oregon," says he, "with no less 
work on their hands and more hostile Indians, 
would do as much exploring the first afternoon, and 
the Sieur de Champlain would have sought an inter- 
view with the savages, and examined the country 
as far as the Connecticut, and made a map of it, 
before Billington had climbed his tree." 






■-. 










Z^ Standish House, Duxbury, 1666 



ALDEN AND STANDISH 27 

Well, the Sieur de Champlain had not with him 
such little travelers as Oceanus Hopkins and Pere- 
grine White. After the deaths of the first winter, 
every one of the few grown men left in the colony- 
was needed for immediate affairs. They could not 
afford to go exploring overmuch. With the excep- 
tion of the madcap Billingtons and one boy Crack- 
ston, they ran very little risk of losing themselves 
in the woods. They went, as much as possible by 
sea, to Kennebeck, to Boston, to all parts of Cape 
Cod. But as to wandering through the woods on 
foot, that was done only for good and warrantable 
reasons, not to see what they could see. 

Yet even here we find a paradox. They were so 
thinned in numbers that they had to be cautious, 
but in an emergency they knew how to be perfectly 
reckless and perfectly adequate to the occasion. 
In March, 1623, when news came that their friend 
Massasoit was "like to die," they knew that, if 
they were to be accounted loyal friends, they must 
follow the Indian custom of paying a visit to the 
chief in his last days. Therefore, Edward Winslow, 
with one Master John Hampden of London, and 
the Indian Hobbomock for guide, set out on foot 
around across the Cape, through what is now East- 
ham, to Mattapoisett, and thence to "Sowams," 
now the town of Warren, Rhode Island, the home 
of Massasoit. In spite of the protests of Hobbo- 
mock, part of the journey through the woods was 
made after nightfall, so eager were they to arrive 
before "Massassowat" died. And the accurate 



28 PILGRIM TRAILS 

Winslow records and translates for us a sentence 
in Massasoit's own language, the very words of 
the great friendly sachem: "Matta neen woncka- 
net namen, Winsnow!" that is to say, 'O Winslow, 
I shall never see thee again.' " Winslow tells us how 
he revived Massasoit by giving him a "confection 
of comfortable conserves on the point of my knife," 
and by performing other helpful offices, "which he 
took marvelous kindly"; and how he then set out 
on his homeward journey, after learning from the 
convalescent Massasoit of the plans of other tribes 
to destroy the paleface colony. On Winslow's re- 
turn trip through the woods, the Indians them- 
selves, he says, "demanded further how we durst, 
being but two, come so far into the country. I 
answered, where was true love, there was no fear." 

They did explore. But their exploring was always 
for community purpose, whether for "true love," 
or for parleys with the French and Dutch, or for 
trade with Squanto's friends at Chatham, or for 
pasturage for their "katle," or for fish. 

We do not know how La Salle and De Soto and 
the Sieur de Champlain would have looked upon 
the woods around Plymouth and the Cape. They 
would probably have thought of them as suburbs 
of the Mississippi. But as we sit on the Standish 
doorstep and glance out toward Plymouth, with 
the harbor between us and the Duxbury woods be- 
hind, we realize that the first settlers here were 
quite completely cut off from the shelter of that 
comely fort on Burial Hill. There was something 



ALDEN AND STANDISH 29 

very hardy and permanent about their pioneering, 
though there was always a reasonable explanation 
for the risks they undertook. There were no he- 
roics about it. Their chronicler says simply, "now 
they must of necessitie goe to their great lots; they 
could not other wise keep their katle." They did 
not come over out of restlessness, or for adventure, 
or primarily for exploring the new continent, at 
all. Mr. John Alden spoke in the authentic colonial 
spirit. They came over to settle it — to open it up. 



Ill 

WINSLOW'S "GREAT LOT" 

From John Alden's land, in early days, a foot- 
path led out along the shore, over Stony Brook, by 
Duck's Hill, to Careswell, the "great lot" granted 
to Edward Winslow. The lot is now the town of 
Marshfield, made famous by Daniel Webster and 
by generations of notable Winslows. 

The Pilgrim Winslow was Plymouth's favorite 
representative in foreign affairs, whether in deal- 
ings with the Dutch, or with the Indians, or with 
the English in London. His friendships were curi- 
ously varied and fortunate; he was admired and 
trusted by such forceful men as Roger Williams, 
Massasoit, and Oliver Cromwell — a vigorous trio. 
When he went plying back and forth on his dip- 
lomatic voyages between Plymouth and England, 
his duties varied from the responsibility of convoy- 
ing twenty hogsheads of beaver to the old country 
and bringing back three heifers and a bull to the 
new, to defending the judicial policy of his friends 
in Boston, and writing such sprightly tracts as 
"Hypocrisie Unmasked" and "New England's 
Salamander Discovered." Oliver Cromwell ap- 
pointed him Commissioner to go to Hispaniola and 
Jamaica, and to confer at Goldsmiths' Hall, Lon- 



WINSLOW'S "GREAT LOT" 31 

don, on a question involving Denmark's seizure of 
English ships after the treaty of peace. The Com- 
missioners were given a certain time to come to a 
decision; and if they could not agree by the day ap- 
pointed, they were to be "shut up in a chamber, 
without fire, candles, meat, or drink, or any other 
refreshment, until they should agree." Cromwell 
believed in international agreements speedily ar- 
rived at. 

On Winslow's land to-day stands the Winslow 
house, built on the old foundation by Isaac Win- 
slow in 1699. This famous homestead, which a few 
years ago was going to wrack and ruin through 
sheer old age, has been restored as nearly as pos- 
sible to its original state of comfort and dignity by 
the Winslow Associates, furnished throughout with 
a rare collection of antique furniture, and opened to 
the many visitors who come that way on their 
route to Plymouth. As you wander through the 
rooms, you find the place a perfect study in early 
building; every detail has been carefully preserved, 
from the "spatter-painted beams" in the kitchen 
and the old fire-back in the parlor, to the fine wood 
finish of the "Parlor Bedroom." You gain a notion 
of the interesting way in which the restoration was 
managed, when you learn that thirty-four coats of 
paint had to be removed from the woodwork of the 
entrance hallway, and that four fireplaces had to be 
taken out of the huge dining-room fireplace to bring 
it back to its original condition. 

It is very fitting that this house, on the land of the 



32 PILGRIM TRAILS 

most internationally minded man of the early col- 
ony, should be cordial to visitors now. Old houses 
make friends easily. They are like people who have 
known our grandfathers — able on that account to 
make us feel at home. And when an ancient house 
bears the name of one of the Pilgrim Forefathers, 
it plays homestead to the whole United States. 

The Winslow mansion, with its great trees and 
its own broad hearths, has not grown bleak in its 
old age, or even austere. There is an Indian word 
preserved for us by Governor Winslow's friend, 
Roger Williams, that might serve as a motto for 
this house. " Nickquenum" says Roger Williams, 
" I am going home> is a solemn word with them; and 
no man will offer any hinderance to him, who after 
some absence is going to visit his family, and useth 
this word Nickquenum." As we go up the flag- 
stone pathway and lift the Marshfield knocker, we 
can easily imagine that generations of famous 
Winslows, returning to their ancestral estate, must 
have approached this house somewhat in the spirit 
of that word used by their grandfather's friends the 
Indians: "Nickquenum, Winsnow!" which is to 
say, "O Winslow — I am going home." 







The Winslow House, Marshfield, i6 99 






IV 
THE CAPE 

If you come from the Firelands in the Middle 
West, if you discover Cape Cod, if you fall in love 
with a little empty ninety-five-year-old house there 
and buy it, with its three acres of pines and locust 
trees and arbutus and rose bushes — then you long 
to go to see it after the deed is filed. It may be the 
dead of winter, but you want to go. You do not 
want to be merely a "summer person." The sea is 
rocking with a February gale, and the rain drives 
over the dunes in slanting gusts. But you go cruis- 
ing down the Cape in the evening train, disembark 
two or three stations short of Provincetown, make 
your way up your lane, unlock your door, light a 
fire in your stove, set a lamp in your window, and 
feel that the house has been waiting there all its 
ninety-five years, for you. 

If you are generous with your share of the world, 
you invite your friends. 

In just this way, our friend from the West filed 
her deed, built her fire with driftwood and pine 
cones, set her teakettle on the stove, and sent for 
Barbara and me to come. 

We had known Cape Cod in summer, with its 
blueberries and its sailing-craft, its wharves and 



34 PILGRIM TRAILS 

artist-colonies and ocean breezes. But we had never 
seen it in winter, with snow on the sand-dunes and 
the wind flying over with sleet and rain. 

An old house with seafaring memories knows 
how to behave in a storm. At high tide, our house 
sits up not so very far above the level of the sea. 
A little Ark on a little Ararat, it was built nearly 
a century ago by Jonah Atkins for Noah Smith; 
Noah and Jonah — surely names of men equipped 
to go a voyage. The lumber for the house had to be 
brought by ship from Maine, thrown overboard off 
shore, rafted up to the land in time of high-course 
tide, spread out on the hill to dry, and then set sol- 
idly together, and pegged. Jonah Atkins made his 
wooden pegs to stay. The gale while we were there 
blew great ships far out of their course at sea, but 
there was not a shiver in the timbers of our roof. 

We took the first stormy day to explore the 
house. To an inlander there is something magical 
about discovering seafaring implements and deep- 
sea fishing-gear of any kind about a house. You 
expect to find such things on ships and wharves; 
but when you find them high and dry, stowed away 
under rafters, they rouse your anchored spirit like 
a ship-ahoy. The corners under our roof were as 
full of treasures as a ship-chandler's loft: all sorts 
of stowaways that had been hidden for years in 
out-of-the-way nooks; a clam-fork under the eaves, 
for instance, and a net-shuttle on the sill. Up 
in the porch-attic, we found a wooden cradle be- 
calmed under the rafters, left there probably when 



THE CAPE 3 s 

the. last little Noah Smith grew too old to voyage 
in such small craft. Something glittered in the 
shadows under the hood of the cradle, and Bar- 
bara reached in to explore. She brought out a large 
globe of heavy glass — not a fish-globe, with an 
opening, but a perfect sphere. We all ventured 
guesses. It could not be a receptacle or lamp- 
accessory of any kind, for there was no entrance 
or exit to it, except a tiny pin-hole clogged up, at 
one point. Was it an ornament, or a toy, or a great 
lens of some kind, or perhaps a globe used by some 
old-time crystal-gazer ? We found out later that 
it was a net-float — a glass buoy to bob on top of 
the waves, holding up a corner of the net at sea. 
You find them sometimes on the beach after a 
storm. An old glass net-float dry-docked under the 
hood of a cradle — we put it back where we 
found it. 

One of our fence-posts was made of a piece of a 
mast, our clothes-horse of teakwood washed ashore 
after the wreck of the Portland, our stool of wreck- 
age from the frigate Jason; and on the end of the 
string to which our back-door key was fastened, 
there hung a large snail-shell, like a seal on a fob. 

But the most nautical of our possessions was the 
carpet on the floor of our kitchen; a carpet made 
of an old sail cut square and spread smoothly and 
painted gray — an old sail with all the wind taken 
out of it, spread, not this time for Java Head or 
Lisbon, but for our kitchen floor ! 

"Now," said our hostess, calling us to the win- 



36 PILGRIM TRAILS 

dow, "perhaps you can understand why they call 
this place The Point." 

We looked out. The whole ocean was crowding 
up the valley, — foam and gulls and driftwood 
and all, — flooding the bed of the Pamet River. 
The marsh-grass and the bottom-lands, which had 
been solid ground two hours before, were the floor 
of the ocean now; the familiar winding channel of 
the Pamet, with its fish-weirs, eel-traps, and boun- 
daries all submerged. 

"Isn't this a sea-going promontory?" inquired 
our proud freeholder, as we watched a sea-gull flap 
its way up against the rain, alight on the water, 
and swim toward our territory over the gusty brine. 
"This, you see, is high-course tide," our friend 
went on, with that double vanity that comes from 
being the possessor of a new estate and a new 
vocabulary. "But it never makes in beyond this 
Point. The Indians used to have their wigwam 
here before the house was built." 

Barbara and I instantly adopted for our own 
permanent possession the sea-going promontory, 
the gulls and the high tide sailing up around our 
premises, and the house itself. 

During our sojourn on the Cape, we learned just 
one thing that we can be sure of: You should never 
make any general statement whatever about Cape Cod. 
If you do, you will find your statement disproved 
by the next turn of the tide, or turn of the road. 
You mention the fact that Bartholomew Gosnold 
discovered it in 1602, naming it Cape Cod because 



:> 




"The Ark" 



THE CAPE 37 

there his boat was so "pestered" with codfish. 
And a well-informed friend will set you right by 
explaining how the Vikings discovered it some six 
hundred years earlier. Or perhaps you are inter- 
ested in weather-vanes. After inspecting them on 
all the barns down the Cape, you say that all 
weather-vanes here are codfish; some flat codfish, 
some solid, but all cod. Instantly you look up and 
see a beautiful swordfish afloat over the roof of 
your neighbor's barn. Perhaps you see Barnstable 
in midwinter, with its marshlands and shores 
packed with cakes of ice, pink and lavender in the 
sunset, with sea-gulls sitting upright on the edges, 
like so many penguins on an Arctic floe. You de- 
cide that the Cape harbors are full of ice. But if 
you inspect the harbor of Provincetown on that 
same day, you are likely to find not a scrap of ice 
on the premises. 

You might as well confine yourself to particu- 
lars, and avoid large sayings of any sort. Thoreau 
is properly cautious about this. Even when he 
speaks of so simple a matter as the rarity of dogs 
and cats on the Atlantic side of the Cape, he 
guards his speech. "Still less," says he, "could you 
think of a cat bending her steps that way and shak- 
ing her wet foot over the Atlantic; yet even this hap- 
pens sometimes > they tell me." They told him the 
truth. A fine, enormous, distinguished-looking 
white cat, sitting on your doorstep at the foot of 
the pilaster of your doorway, is as common on 
some parts of the Cape as the pointed Christmas- 



38 PILGRIM TRAILS 

trees in green tubs on the doorsteps of old houses 
in certain cities inland. Remarkable cats, brindle 
or yellow or tiger or snowball or gray, they are 
loved while they live, lamented when they die. 
"If I could look out of the window," said a little 
boy whose favorite cat had died, "and see my 
Bobbie coming down the road, wouldn't I wun to 
let him in ?" The Cape Cod cats are not confined 
to doorsteps. They catch the Cape Cod mice. And 
at least one elegant pure-white cat of our acquain- 
tance goes stepping down the Cape with her master, 
shaking her wet foot over the Atlantic, perhaps, 
but waiting until it is time to go back, and then 
escorting him home. 

Therefore, since it is so unsafe to generalize, we 
are resolved to make no sweeping statements about 
the Cape Cod house. You cannot be too sure even 
about your own. You discover this when you take 
its measurements for curtains and wall-paper; no 
two apertures and no two surfaces are alike. 

But, with due reservations, there is one sort of 
old house that was most nearly standardized by the 
early builders: the low-studded, story-and-a-half 
house, with its long gable roof, its many little win- 
dows tucked up under the point of the gable, its 
front to the south, its * ' West Entry " at one side, and 
its six-panel door, with a row of little square glass 
panes above it — sometimes a row of four lights, 
sometimes five. More rarely there is a fan-light 
over the door, curving out to the pilasters at each 
side. 



THE CAPE 39 

All this varies a little, and most of the houses 
have been altered more or less by subsequent gen- 
erations. But whenever you come upon the regula- 
tion, unspoiled Cape Cod house, there is a general 
plan that you recognize at once. 

For example: the term "West Entry" is no idle 
phrase. West Entry means west entry, regardless 
of your angle to the road. Your house faces the 
south, and your side entry faces west, though the 
road may run at random on a wild slant, and 
though your west entry open on the midst of the 
sea. Itvdoes not matter whether you face the high- 
way or not, does it ? A road is a perishable and 
human thing at best; but the points of the compass 
mean business on the Cape. 

Our own house is a perfect illustration of the re- 
sults of this theory: if you should ever wish to reach 
our West Entry, you would have to circumnavigate 
our Point, and scale an all-but-inaccessible bank 
to the unused door. Because of this inconvenience 
of our "entry," we always expect callers to come in 
at the door of our kitchen — our porch. For the 
benefit of the uninstructed it may be well to say that 
when we speak of our "porch" on our part of the 
Cape, we mean the same thing as an ell. Our 
porch is an ell with an attic over it, a kitchen chim- 
ney, our stove, and our pump and major equip- 
ment for the industries of the day. It opens into 
the "winter kitchen," where they did their fireplace 
cooking years ago, before there was a stove in the 
porch. 



4 o PILGRIM TRAILS 

The outside piazza arrangement, unroofed, we 
call our platform, or walk. Ours is very neatly made 
of matched planks, with one part at the end clev- 
erly arranged to slide, so that you can draw out 
the planks a little and get down into the manhole 
that incloses the pipes from pump to drilled well. 
On cold winter nights, you let yourself down on 
the ladder twelve feet underground, to turn off the 
water in the pump, if you are afraid that the pipes 
are going to freeze. I shall never forget the sensa- 
tion of usefulness that filled my beating heart when 
I disappeared down that hatchway one clear cold 
night and opened the little faucet far below. When 
you go down that neat, perfectly smooth tube, with 
the winter stars shining solemnly down on the top 
of your head, you feel like a more slender Saint 
Nicholas making his way down a sootless chimney. 

The Cape Cod cellar is also interesting to a new- 
comer. It is a small circular dungeon-keep, solidly 
built of masonry, usually under the "east room." 
You go into it down a short flight of steps on the 
outside of the house, through a small entry which 
has the outer aspect of a tall dog-kennel, and the 
inner aspect of a Dutch interior, perfectly spotless. 
Some authorities say that the Cape cellars were 
made circular to prevent the heavy sand from 
breaking through by undue pressure on any one 
wall, as would happen in a four-cornered cellar. 
Others imagine that seafaring men made their 
cellars circular on the principle of the half-barrel 
in the sand. An old stone-mason says that they 



THE CAPE 41 

did it because firm corners of field-rock are so hard 
to make. But when you stand in these spick-and- 
span circles of solid masonry, — an interior like 
the inside of a bowl, — you suspect that the tidy 
housewives planned the rounded walls so as to 
leave no odd corners for spiders and cobwebs. 

There may be square cellars on the Cape, and 
there certainly are some west entries that point the 
wrong way. But in general, when you enter a Cape 
Cod "three-quarters" house, you go in through 
the porch-door, you sit and visit in the winter kitch- 
en, and you have your wedding in The Room. 
Porch, winter kitchen, pantry, east bedroom, The 
Room, the west bedroom near the west entry — 
it is a charming and compact arrangement for a 
little house, with regard for space and views and 
corners. Unless your "sight" from the windows is 
cut off by trees or hills, you have views of ocean 
dawns and sunsets framed in delicate white mould- 
ing, and seen through small square panes. The 
world outside appears like a series of pictures seen 
through an artist's finder. If your house tops a 
dune on the narrow part of the Cape, you may see 
the sails on the horizon of the Atlantic on the east, 
and the sails on the horizon of the Bay on the west; 
a clear view of the salt water straight across the 
Cape in both directions. 

As you go down from Barnstable to Province- 
town, in automobile or by train, you notice that 
there are more windows than you expect to see in 
the triangle under the slope of the roofs. Com- 



42 PILGRIM TRAILS 

monly, you see two large windows in the middle of 
the upper half-story, and on each side of these, 
under the slope of the roof, two much smaller win- 
dows in the corners. Perhaps there is even a fifth 
window, sometimes triangular, sometimes elon- 
gated, under the very peak of the roof. Thoreau 
was mightily pleased with these. He said that it 
looked as if every member of the family had 
punched a hole through the upper half-story, the 
better to see the view — large windows for Father 
and Mother, small windows for children, on the 
principle of large door for the cat and small door 
for the kitten. The two large windows light the one 
square room finished off under the peak of the roof. 
The other smaller windows are to ventilate the 
"open chambers" — the slope-roofed spaces left 
on either side of the finished room, under the rafters. 
In large families, in the early days, some of the 
children had to sleep out in these open chambers, 
under the slope of the roof. There is at least one 
noted man of affairs in the United States to-day 
who affirms that there is one rafter in the open 
chamber of a certain house on Cape Cod that has 
a slight but clearly defined hollow worn in it, where 
he used to collide with the roof when he got aboard 
his trundle-bed in the dark. 

The Double House is different; the two-story 
house is different; the steep-roofed house is differ- 
ent; and so are the houses built by summer people. 
There are even a few houses made of old wind- 
mills, with three stories: living-room on the ground 




Old Fish Wharf, Cape Cod 



THE CAPE 43 

floor, little bedroom on the second floor, tiny bed- 
room up aloft, and a look-out that is almost level 
with the windmill sails. 

But let us stick to our own experience. In our 
own house, and in those of the neighbors around us, 
you see delicate white paneling around the fire- 
place up to the ceiling; an antique china closet with 
its old copper-lustre and sprigged ware; white wain- 
scoting around the room up to the level of the win- 
dow-sills; exquisite moulding all around the win- 
dows and doors; in short, it is the simplest little 
house in the world, in plan, with unexpected beauty 
of detail. Braided mats on the floor, a fire in the 
stove, and a breeze from the Azores scudding over 
our roof — there certainly is good comfort even in 
dead of winter on the Cape. 

We are glad that the Pilgrims were "joyfull" at 
the sight of "Cap-Codd." They decided not to 
pause there, but to "stande for ye southward to 
finde some place aboute Hudsons river for their 
habitation." But they were turned back by the 
"deangerous shoulds and roring breakers," and 
were thankful to bear up again along the Atlantic 
side of the Cape until they got into harbor, "wher 
they ridd in safetie." 

In our intervals of fair weather, we visited the 
places where they stopped: Chatham where they 
were turned back, Provincetown where they waded 
ashore, Truro where they camped for the night and 
explored the Pamet River, and Corn Hill where 
they found "diverce faire Indean baskets filled with 



44 PILGRIM TRAILS 

corne." All this country was as wintry as the Pil- 
grims found it, with long streaks of snow caught in 
the beach-grass on the tops of the camel-back 
dunes. From the crest of one dune, we watched the 
sun dropping over the harbor until it rested on the 
water, like a great luminous net-float drifting off to 
sea. 

Provincetown we saw in a flying snow-squall, all 
the marine colors so loved by the artists softened in 
the snowy light, even the strange blue of a guinea- 
boat by the fish-wharf. Hollyhock Lane was only 
a narrow passageway of frosty stubble, and the sea- 
gulls winging over looked ghostly against the pale 
sky. The wharves, the monument, the lighthouse, 
and the sails in the harbor were blurred by the fine 
flakes that filled the air. 

But the snow soon changed to rain, the squall 
turned into a northeast wind, the wind rose to a 
gale, and Barbara and I decided to see the Atlantic 
in a real storm. We went home first for rubber 
coats, and then set off down the road to the ocean 
side of the Cape. The wind from the Atlantic goes 
over the Pamet valley in one great rush of invisible 
swiftness. As you lean forward against it, you feel 
that you must run to hold your own. If we had 
been going the other way, we could have spread our 
cloaks and gone flying home like witches, over the 
dunes. x-\s it was, beating our way against it, we 
had to stop in the lee of the bayberry slopes to 
catch our breath. Ahead of us we saw only the 
wave-like crests of the dunes, one after another, 



THE CAPE 45 

with their patches of ruddy wild cranberry, and 
their streaks of sand and snow. And then, as we 
went battling over the top of the last rise in the 
road, we saw between two sand-dunes ahead of us a 
darker hill beyond, its peculiar heavy gray color- 
ing dull and threatening; its crest lay straight 
against the sky, and all the snowy white streaks 
along it were in motion. It was the sea. 
- We made for the top of the nearest dune ahead. 
It rose up steep as a breaker itself, with a jagged 
edge at the top where the wind had scooped out 
sharp hollows at the roots of the beach-grass. We 
each made straight for one of these hollows, in one 
last determined dash up the sheer slope. All this 
time, the noise of tumult had been growing louder 
and louder, and when we reached the crest, there 
it was before us, the whole Atlantic ocean rearing 
toward our frail strip of sandy shore. We had the 
horrible impression that the whole roaring thing 
was one gray hill of water, coming in. The breakers 
were plunging along from sky to shore with no re- 
gard for order. You could not have watched for the 
ninth wave, for they were breaking in masses, three 
great thunderheads at a time crashing into each 
other from different directions and coming up the 
beach with a shout, still struggling together in 
foam. Before they were half-way in, another surge 
was almost on top of them, with a huge white- 
horse breaker rearing at one side — everywhere one 
rush of confusion and terrible tossing with white 
crests of spray. There was not a sail in sight, or a 



46 PILGRIM TRAILS 

human being, or an island, or a bird; only a world 
of furious water and a ragged horizon of mist and 
trailing cloud as far as we could see in three 
directions. 

It is hard to believe that the Mayflower came 
cruising over the Atlantic through just such winds. 
"In sundrie of these stormes," says Bradford, "the 
winds were so feirce & ye seas so high, as they could 
not beare a knote of sail, but were forced to hull, 
for diverce days togither." When we think how 
the sea can growl around an ocean-liner now, and 
then think how the little Mayflower went hulling 
for diverce days in "mighty storme," we wonder 
how it ever got here at all. And indeed, we are told 
that at one time in mid-ocean, when the main beam 
of the little craft buckled, there was nothing be- 
tween the passengers and shipwreck except a cer- 
tain "great iron scrue ye passengers brought from 
Holland which would raise ye beam to his place." 
They screwed up the scrue and calked the deck; 
and though they knew that "with the working of 
ye ship they would not long keep stanch," they 
hoped that she might weather the rest of the voyage 
if they did not overpress her with sails. 

" So," remarks the Governor with fine simplicity, 
"they comited them selves to ye will of God, & 
resolved to proseede." 

The whole story of that voyage has in it the 
vitality of the wind at sea. It has also the nobility 
always found when the human will goes somewhere 
and does something with the minimum of material 










■-"**& - 



53H 



7%^ Pilgrim Monument, Provincetown 



THE CAPE 47 

equipment, alone, against odds, for the sake of a 
true conviction. Materially, the Pilgrims had the 
narrowest possible margin. A great iron screw to 
prop their beam; a great iron purpose to prop their 
souls. 

We do well to hold in honor those who voyage 
alone through "crosse winds and feirce stormes 
into desperat and inevitable perill," in the power 
of a noble thought. We erect our monuments to 
those who, with discouragement and danger and 
threatened shipwreck all around them, valiantly 
prop up their beam, calk their decks, commit them- 
selves to the will of God — and "resolve to 
proseede." 

THE END 



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